Patricia MacCormack - Deleuze and the Demonological Text

‘In Becoming…’ Deleuze and Guattari invoke and encourage in our becomings active evocation of demons and monsters. Much has been written on the dilemma of launching a becoming. If, by its nature, becoming is non-narrative, the notion of a beginning is problematic. Similarly feminists have maligned the fetishization of ‘woman’ in becomings, and increasingly animal rights anti-speciesists (well, me at least) have emphasised that becoming animal both homogenises all that falls away from the human and defaults our becomings to animal, which risks being no different, albeit in reverse, to the Oedipalisation of the family dog. In order to catalyse becomings they urge us to be demonologists and sorcerers. As sorcerers our invoked entities toward becomings are confabulations of hybrids and monsters, inter-species, both imagined and actualised through techniques of alterity and ‘packing’. Far from being literary or metaphoric references these monstrous entities – werewolves, vampires, Lovecraftian ancient-ones